Good evening. Im Chris Matthews in washington. Federal prosecutors in new york have accused the president of criminal violation of the federal Campaign Laws. They say trump directed thats the word Michael Cohen to cover up a Campaign Contribution in the form of payments with two women with whom he had sexual relations. This comes from the Southern District of new york, not Robert Mueller, not the socalled 17 democrats the president says are working against him, not the deep state, not from a witch hunt. Its from one of the two Sentencing Memos filed in the case of trumps former lawyer, Michael Cohen, today, which are shedding new light on the president s potential legal exposure. As trumps longtime fixer, cohen pleaded guilty in august to Campaign Finance violations and making hush payments to two women on trumps behalf. And now, tonights Sentencing Memo makes clear that with respect to both payments, cohen acted in coordination with and at the direction of individual
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A memo set for implementation calls for bringing all Department of Defense civilian, military, and contractor clearance disputes under the umbrella of the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA).
about the evidence against cohen being, quote, overwhelming, and that he didn t cooperate out of sort of the goodness of his heart or spirit, but because he was really caught red-handed. so, for trump to say that this clears him, we don t know that all of the evidence that is, quote, overwhelming against cohen, but i m willing to go out on a limb here now and say that given what the southern district has put in black and white, in writing, about the president s actions, i m willing to bet that there is good evidence that trump had the requisite intent to commit this crime as well. and i ll go out on a limb and say this is the biggest act of self-delusion since baghdad bob, who said they were winning the war. i want to bring in ari melber, who s been brilliance on this tonight, msnbc s chief correspondent as well as host of the beat. ari, i love the way you put it up and i want to go back to a deeper question. when trump got away for a while, for a few weeks, with the access hollyw
investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with company executives during the campaign. i want to bring in david on this and natasha. david first. we re talking here about cohen s relationship with trump executives, the family members, the people at the top, working on russia stuff, but this phrase, synergy, sounds to me like a synonym for collusion! well, it could be. they claim that that conversation didn t lead to anything. but the second quote that you just cited from i think is the most significant thing on the russian front in all these filings. we ve got to take it slowly. that cohen provided mueller with useful information, certain discrete russian-related matters, plural. so we re not talking just about the moscow tower project that we know about. russian-related matters core to its investigation. trump keeps saying there s nothing about russia here. mueller is telling us core to our investigation hacking? i don t know what it s about, but the othe
directing a political activity, the cover-up of that campaign contribution in great, intricate fashion, according to that memo today, about how michael cohen really went around to try to create the paperwork to make it look like something it wasn t. they say in that memo today, in that sentencing memo, that michael cohen knew what he was doing. he s a lawyer. he was politically sophisticated enough to know he s breaking the law. and proof of that was the way in which he was covering it up, with such intricate effort. do you believe it s possible or plausible that the president of the united states, who was directing him to do so, didn t know he was doing so to cover up a crime? i believe it is totally implausible that the president had no idea there was a cover-up ongoing here, if he knew the facts, as apparently, the southern district of new york believes that he did. it seems both impossible and implausible that he didn t understand the motive and the criminal intent here as well a